Gene Smith, my partner at nForm, has put together a fantastic program for our upcoming Web Strategy Summit. With a focus on driving business value, the Web Strategy Summit offers the kind of ideas, stories, and tools to make the most of your web investment.

We’ve got amazing folks like Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester), Christina Wodtke (LinkedIn), Henning Fisher (Adaptive Path), Jay Goldman (The Facebook Cookbook), Russ Unger (Draftfcb) and Avinash Kaushik (Google) and lots more.

Running on May 4 & 5 in beautiful Calgary, Alberta, the Summit has workshops running on day one, with a jam-packed program for the main conference on day two.

Early registration closes on March 20. Until then, the main conference is $399 and each half-day workshop is $299 (for US friends, you’ll be paying about 20% less since that’s in Canadian dollars).

Details and registration at the Web Strategy Summit site.

Hope to see you in Calgary!

So, like I wrote about yesterday, decisions are fractal - big decisions are often composed of a lot of smaller decisions.

But there’s another kind of big decision that we need to think about: decisions are big when they have a big impact, not just when they take a lot of resources or involve a lot of smaller decisions.

That leads us to the princple of 80/20 influence. In the world, we see a lot of instances of Pareto’s 80/20 rule - 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. That’s true in the world of influence, too. A relatively small number of decisions can make a huge difference in the overall outcomes of a project.

It’s easy to get a gut-level check of the 80/20 principle for influence. The challenge is picking the right 20% of decisions to focus on in advance, instead of in hindsight. But hindsight is a good place to start, along with a few other flags that can help us narrow in on the best places to make a difference.

• History - what kinds of decisions have really impacted your organization in the past? Are there similar decisions happening now? Use hindsight to guide your influence attention.
• Seniority - how far up the chain does the decision go? Are people with great track records involved?
• Frequency - how often is this decision made? Typically, decisions made farther apart are going to have more overall impact. An annual budget decision has more impact than decision about funding a one-off pilot.
• Accessibility - how much can you personally influence the conversation? Maybe getting that one-off pilot funding will set the stage for a regular budget commitment next year.
• Status Quo - how well does the decision fit in with how things have always been done? The more something matches the status quo, the less chance it has to change it, but the less it matches, the less likely it will get support. Finding a balance that expands the status quo instead of ignoring it helps in most risk-averse organizations.
• Framing - defining the problem has a huge impact on everything that follows. 
• Process principles - agreeing on principles like human-centered design, rapid prototyping, agile, or other high-level approaches will make a big difference.
• Process details - but getting caught up in wireframes, or an Illustrator vs. Visio argument won’t make as much of a difference.

There’s more, but that’s a good start to finding the decisions that matter most. Let me know if you have other flags that help you figure out which choices are bigger than others. You can leave a comment here, or send a shout on Twitter.

When we talk about influencing decisions, it’s important to recognize that many decisions hinge on a whole bunch of other smaller decisions.

Decisions are often fractal - we see decisions within decisions within decisions. And that helps us sort out what kind of decisions we need to focus on for influencing outcomes. Matching the level of decisions to the level of outcomes helps us be more effective. If we want to shift company strategy, but we’re focused on decisions about color or layout, then we’ve got a disconnect between our objectives and our actions.

At the same time, choosing the right small decisions can add up to shifting a big decision - we may not be able to simply shift one big decision about company strategy, so we find smaller decisions that contribute to strategy and work on affecting those. That’s matching decisions to our ability to affect them.

Finally, and I’ll have more to say about this tomorrow, is that we need to pick the decisions that have the most bang for our influence buck. Some decisions just don’t matter as much to the outcomes that we’re pursuing. Wasting effort trying to affect decisions that don’t matter is far too common in corporate life. Don’t fall into that trap - instead of developing iterative influence, you’ll just be running around in circles.

The foundation of influence is your network of relationships in the organization. Effective influence  is best when your relationships are both focused and wide.

Wide influence covers a larger group at a less personal level. While you have relationships and reputation in that group, you may not have a known track record or tight connections. For influencing organizations, that means that you’ve got contacts, conversations, and awareness across the org chart. Wide influence also gives you the awareness to make multi-disciplinary connections, a key source for innovation.

Focused influence is narrower, concentrated relationships with key individuals. That might be in the executive suite, or in marketing,  in R&D or in all three. Focused influence is something that happens more in small groups and especially one-on-one. It takes time to cultivate. It grows from shared experiences, shared successes (ands sometimes shared failures), and shared values and vision. That doesn’t mean that people in your focused influence core always agree with you. But they do know and respect you. Make sure you respect them too, because this kind of confidence is easy to lose if you take them for granted.

Combining both wide and focused influence gives you the breadth to know how your influence efforts relate to the rest of the organization combined with the deep foundation of trust and support that helps you move forwards.

As you move forwards, you can build the track record and one-on-one with individuals in your wide network that shifts them to your focused core of colleagues. That gives you the opportunity to expand the size of your T, both in depth and in breadth. In turn, a bigger T gives you a stronger platform for affecting decisions and outcomes in the organization.

This T-Shaped approach operates at many different scales - you might be operating across the entire org chart, with depth in one key business area. Or you might be working with a small group, like a committee, and have depth with one or two key people.

Either way, the T-Shaped approach can help us build the base for future influence efforts.

Takeaway

Ask yourself: Do I have wider or more focused influence relationships right now? If you have a wider base, take time to cultivate more one-on-one relationships. And if you’re already tight with key players, but don’t know what’s happening on the next floor, take a walk, and start to make connections across the organization.

Time Deficit Version: For influencing organizations, you can ask “Five Whos” to get to key decision makers.

Many readers will be familiar with the 5 Whys approach to getting to root causes. Formalized by Toyota in the 1970s as part of the Toyota Production System and popularized by Six Sigma, 5 Whys looks for the real reason for a particular issue by repeatedly asking why. Channeling a three-year old’s inquisitiveness peels back the layers to reveal the root cause of an issue. Of course, five is just a good rule of thumb, and reaching the underlying cause can take more or less iterations.

For influence, we can take this iterative questioning approach and use it to help uncover the influence network we are working with. But instead of asking “WHY” we should ask “WHO”.

We know that influence is about shaping decisions, and decisions are made by people.

So, just who are those people? That’s one of the core questions we need to know to be effective in shaping decisions and outcomes.

Sometimes the answer is simple (your boss, or your client) and that’s all. But for most significant decisions, there’s more going on…a lot more. Ask “Who” five times can help reveal the people who shape the decisions you care about.

That might look something like this:

1. Who is going to make the decision you care about?
2. Who else is going to affect that decision?
3. Besides those people, are there other players?
4. Who else affects those players?
5. Who have you left out? 

Asking Who five times often uncovers far more than five people. So a final “who” question can be “Who matters most?” (more on answering that another time).

Other “Who” questions to ponder:

• Who is affected by this decision?
• Who supports this outcome?
• Who is against this outcome?
• Who benefits?
• Who loses? or Who thinks they lose? Does an outcome make anyone look bad? Who?
• Who loves the status quo?
• Who hates the status quo?
• Who is seen as the voice of wisdom?
• Who has a great track record?
• Who has a spotty track record?
• Who has a solid reputation in the company or community?
• Who has a past history with other people here?
• Who has been involved in trying to deliver similar results?
• Who controls the relevant infrastructure or resources (legal, financial, technical, or policy)?

I’ll expand and sort this list another time, and leave you with one last key “Who” question, one you will need to ask far more than five times:

Who next? Who do you need to work with next to get the outcomes that you want to drive? That’s at the center of the Influence Worksheet I published last week.

Knowing “who” is critical for influencing the decisions that determine your project’s success. Knowing the questions to ask gets you that much closer.

What are some of your favorite questions for uncovering the players in corporate decisions? Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter. Thanks!

Influence theory and models won’t help you reach your design goals if you can’t put them into practice.

So I’ve boiled down the influence gameplan into a 1 page worksheet (pdf) to get a sense of how to tackle things in the real world.

This sheet is about influencing outcomes inside an organization (not influencing consumers to buy or behave a certain way, that’s a different post). Before we can influence user behavior, we have to influence business behavior to actually get the design done ;-)

This is very much a draft, so please leave your comments or @ me on Twitter. The small version here links to a PDF for closer viewing. 

The worksheet asks seven core questions. We’ve been building these questions through the different takes on influence I’ve posted recently.

1. What is the big, overall goal you want to achieve?
   There’s no point trying to influence something if you don’t know what you want to have happen in the end. 
    
2. How will you know you’ve succeeded?
   And that outcome needs to be in concrete, specific terms so you can see when you’re getting closer (and where things are going off course).
    
3. What is the very next outcome you need to get closer to your goal?
   This is the key question for iterative influence, and breaks big goals into manageable, actionable, influenceable chunks.
    
4.  Who can help you achieve that outcome?
   This is the other side of the coin of asking the next outcome question, and in some ways is even more important. The person might be your boss, or a peer. It might be someone in IT, or in the call center, or maybe at a client outside your firm. It could even be your fiercest critic. 
    
5. What does that person value? What’s in it for them to help you out? This is going to help direct the next question.
   5a. How are you going to work together with that person?
   That may be one-on-one, or in a group. It may focus on data or on stories.  
    
6. Once you engage, what’s the outcome? Did you get that very next step, or are you shifted to another path? Either way, loop back to Question #3 - what’s the next outcome now?

I’ll be expanding on these core questions over the coming weeks.

Here’s a simple example of working through getting a project off the ground (links to full size PDF example so you can read it).

Let’s say you’re a team lead in a web department for a large company. Here’s how a relatively straightforward influence process might roll out.

1. What is the big, overall goal you want to achieve?
   The goal here is to get the greenlight for rearchitecting and redesigning a key intranet section, for Employee Benefits. Poor findability and design on the intranet that is costing the company a lot of money in wasted employee time. The benefits section is the hotspot for this failure.
2. How will you know you’ve succeeded?
   While there have been vague “we should do something about that” sentiments, we want a budget and a team assigned to the project with a specific start date. 
3. What is the very next outcome you need to get closer to your goal?
   The very next thing is to make sure that HR is still focused on this area before you go selling the project.
4. Who can help you achieve that outcome?
   So you need to go talk with Alan, who is the HR Web Coordinator and the one who really wants the project done, since he gets dumped on when people can’t find their benefits information online.
5. What does that person value? What’s in it for them to help you out? This is going to help direct the next question.
   Alan feels like he inherited an ugly mess, and this project is his chance to show that he can do things better.
   5a. How are you going to work together with that person?
   I just need to drop by Alan’s desk and give him the heads up that I’m ready to go.
6. Once you engage, what’s the outcome? Did you get that very next step, or are you shifted to another path? Either way, loop back to Question #3.
   Alan is excited that we’re finally going ahead. Now it’s time to get your boss in the loop…

After confirming with Alan, then we meet with other players, from George, the Web Director (and your boss), to Allison, the VP of HR, and the team that’s going to be on the frontlines getting the project done.

Of course, there isn’t any big pushback in this scenario, but I hope it shows you how the sheet works.

 So, a few disclaimers:

First, this is a draft, and it’s not perfect in content or layout. Feedback much appreciated.

Second, for many decisions, the sheet isn’t big enough to show enough ‘next outcomes’. Real change often takes many more interactions.

Finally, if you use this in a work setting, this kind of information can be super inflammatory if someone unexpectedly finds their name on a plan like this. Be careful. I am not responsible if you’re in hot water for using it. That said, this approach is often fine if you’re transparent about it - “I’m just making sure I’ve got everyone on board” or words to that effect can be useful, though I still wouldn’t parade the sheet around.

The Worksheet is Like Influence Training Wheels

I don’t think you need to use this sheet every time you have a decision to affect. Instead, I think of this worksheet like training wheels, or a teleprompter - useful as you start to get going, and a good reminder of how to tackle influence problems. As you put these principles into practice, you’ll find yourself  using these steps as second nature, no worksheet required. And if you already know how to sell design and UX inside your organization, then the worksheet is a good reminder of how to bring things together.

So, disclaimers over with, what do you think? How does this jive with your experience? What could be clearer? Are there pieces I’ve missed? Changes?  Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments. Thanks!

Groups and individuals are the yin and yang of influence. To convince a group often means convincing individuals. And convincing individuals often means convincing a group. Knowing who to focus on, and in what setting is the key question we have to answer when we want to affect a decision.

Getting a group to agree on a course of action can mean taking one-on-one time with different members of the group, or meeting in a smaller group. And sometimes, convincing an individual needs the social proof of group support.

As you work towards a particular outcome, you may switch between group and individual interactions over time. The exact mix will depend on the situation, and especially the decision making styles, issues, and authority of those involved.

We can also visualize what one set of interactions might be, as you meet with a group, and then individuals one one one and with members of the group in a smaller setting:

This is just a hypothetical example of how those interactions might play out over time as you work with different people in the group. The key thing is recognizing when you can make progress as a group, and when you should reserve your efforts for smaller or one-on-one conversations.

Last year, on the last evening of the 2008 IA Summit in Miami, I invited myself onto Samantha Bailey’s 2009 committee with the stated intention of creating a Business & Strategy track for 2009. Mags Hanley popped over, nominated herself co-chair, and added management to the roster. And with that, the Business Strategy & Management track was sparked.

Now, 10 months later, the track is a reality. With the selections done, I couldn’t be more pleased with the results - we have 11 fantastic sessions that are dealing with the bigger picture of strategy, ROI, management, and other concerns that keep user experience practice  from being boxed into becoming a wireframe factory. You can check out the full list of sessions on the Summit site - the specific schedule that breaks out the track is gelling as we speak (err…read?)

We looked at 47 submissions in our track, plus another half dozen or so that seemed lost over in the General sessions. Lots of great thinking, lots of great ideas. If I could change one thing, I’d like more slots for the track so we could have said yes more often :)

Many thanks to Mags, Samantha, and conference co-chair Jennifer Bohmbach for making it easy to pull together the track.

And now for the part with the weepy violins…while I’m super proud of the track and what it says about how the IA Summit and the UX community are growing, I won’t be there in Memphis to enjoy it. With a newborn at home, I’ve got more important priorities, and so I’ll miss the Summit for the first time since I started going in 2003. I’m sure you’ll let me know how the Business track goes, though. Early registration deadline is coming fast, on February 7, so make sure you save a few bucks by snapping up your spot now. The IA Summit is in Memphis, from March 18-22.

Bob Cialdini is a social psychologist at University of Arizona who has studied influence and persuasion since the 1970s (maybe earlier?).

His landmark book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion distilled 20 years of academic research into six principles of influence.  I’ve taken those and put them into an influence honeycomb diagram.

1. Reciprocity
   If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. People feel obliged to do things in return for someone who has done something for them.
2. Authority
   People are more persuaded if they recognize the influencer’s authority. Third-party authority can also be used to bolster influence.
3. Social Proof
   “Everyone else is doing it”. Seeing other people take the same course or lean a certain way makes someone more likely to be persuaded.
4. Commitment & Consistency
   People are more likely to be influenced when they have made a small commitment or are acting in a way that are consistent with how they see themselves.
5. Liking
   People are more likely to be convinced by someone they like. Liking comes from things like humor, similarity, attractiveness.
6. Scarcity
   People are more likely to be persuaded when they have a sense of scarcity. That might be a deadline (scarcity of time) or scarcity of inventory (”it’s the last one in the store”).

Now, these principles aren’t the be-all, end-all of influence, particularly for corporate decisions. But they’re an interesting foundation when we thing about influence. 

Influence doesn’t happen overnight, especially the ability to affect big decisions.

Instead, influence is iterative—each successful influence opportunity builds on the last. We want to make that cycle an upward spiral that lets us make bigger and better impacts on the decisions made in the organizations we work with.

I’m playing around with what that overall iterative cycle looks like, and have five areas that come to mind: Desired Outcomes, Access, Decisions, Value, and Impact.

1. Desired Outcomes
You need to know what you want to have happen before you can shift decisions to support those outcomes.

2. Access
You need to have access to people before you can influence them. That access can be direct, or through other people who have direct access.

3. Decision
When you have access, you need to recognize what decisions are in play, and the overall process of making decisions so you can choose where to apply your influence. I wrote about this decision cycle a few days ago.

4. Value
You need to create and communicate value as you work with the people you influence. While you may already be confident in the value your suggestions carry, you need to be able to understand what is most valuable to others and how to communicate the value of your ideas in their own language.

5. Impact
Finally, influence isn’t a one-shot affair. What’s the impact of your efforts? Are your outcomes achieved? Do you have new goals to pursue? Are you recognized for the contributions you’ve made?

Deep influence is earned bit by bit, not all at once. And while that’s frustrating when you want to jump in and alter the course of a big decision, it lowers your personal risk since you’re not staking your reputation and credibility on an all-or-none proposition.

So, questions:

Are these really the pieces that go into iterative influence? Are there other parts that you think are more important? Is anything missing? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

Thanks!